Electronic Monitors Provide Care without Doctor

June 29, 2009 - 12:39 am | 59 views

Technology.am (June 29, 2009) — The 37,000-square-foot Kaiser’s Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center, has associated with the technology research and testing lab for the nation’s largest nonprofit health maintenance organization, which covers about one-third of insured Californians.

Electronic-Monitors The center has a full-size mockup of a hospital floor, complete with nursing stations and patient rooms, plus an operating room, simulated home and miniclinic.

You can use the center to test everything from new types of hospital floor material or workflow adjustments to robotic nursing assistants and high-definition operating room video screens.

In the simulated miniclinic was a prototype stainless-steel kiosk that looked like a cross between a bank ATM and an airline self-check-in machine.

So imagine in the future, you use a kiosk like this to quickly check in by inserting your membership card and also do your co-pay by inserting a credit card.

A self-service kiosk is already being tried in about 100 Kaiser hospitals in California. It can be programmed to respond in several languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Armenian.

Kaiser plans to add other functions, such as a way for patients to check their blood pressure, weight, temperature, oxygen level and pulse.

By the time the doctor calls you in, you’re ready for that examination, and you don’t have to go to the nursing station.

The center is testing more lower-tech home monitors, such as one made by Honeywell International that resembles a digital clock radio that is part of a pilot project involving 600 congestive heart failure patients in Northern California.

In the mock living room was high-definition flat-panel TV equipped with video conferencing technology that can give a remote dermatologist a diagnostic-quality picture of a person’s rash or other skin problem.

Another flat-panel monitor is being used to test biometric facial identification software that allows health care workers to log in to private patient data in a computer without having to remove their gloves or having to scrub up again after touching a keyboard, mouse or touch screen.

Some of the gadgets are already popular consumer products, such as Nintendo’s Wii game console. The center is looking for ways to use the Wii’s motion-activated controls for medical uses, such as letting doctors explain an X-ray image without running their fingers over the film.

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